Tag Archives: for-profit colleges

In today’s “For-Profit Colleges Are Scummy and Bad” news, we bring you the tale of Florida’s “FastTrain” chain of educational institutions, which went out of business in 2012 following raids by the FBI. The company’s CEO and three other executives are now the subject of criminal indictments for conspiracy and theft of government funds through their scammy little quasi-educational enterprise, which at one time operated seven storefront “campuses” in the state. In addition to the usual elements you’d expect in a story like this — bogus training, high fees paid for by federal education programs, and leaving students with worthless certificates and piles of student loans that they’ll never escape, FastTrain also went out of its way to be especially scummy, and we aren’t just talking about the strippers they used to recruit students.
Read more on Scammy For-Profit ‘College’ Knew What Students Want: Strippers…

John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is back from vacation, and brings us this cheery back-to-school report about the growing problem of student loan debt. There’s more student debt in U.S. America than credit card or car loan debt, and it’s second only to mortgage debt, which we seem to remember caused some sort of a little dust-up in the economy a short while back (but that was only because Barney Frank forced banks to loan money to bad poors). Oliver warns that “student debt is like HPV: If you go to college, you’re almost certainly going to get it, and if you do, it will follow you for the rest of your life.”
Read more on John Oliver Terrifies Us About Student Debt. Also, Space Geckos: The Sad Goodbye (Video)…

Damn that Barack Obama and his relentless destruction of free enterprise — he’s gone and done it again, this time killing off a fine little for-profit college that had done nothing wrong at all except for not actually teaching students much of anything, charging through the nose for its classes, and not responding to lawful federal requests for data on whether its graduates actually got jobs in the fields it “trained” them for. Eric Owens at the Daily Caller has the shocking story of big government out of control: Read more on Barack Obama Murders Capitalism, For-Profit College Just For Being Massive Scam…

As Barbara Ehrenreich noted in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, it can cost a hell of a lot to be poor. From residential motels that charge by the week (but don’t require a deposit) to rent-to-own furniture stores and predatory used-car loans, there is a thriving segment of the market dedicated to charging poor people a premium for stuff that would otherwise not be available at all.
In a terrific Village Voice article, Chris Parker takes us on a tour of the double-markup inner-city bodegas of education, the for-profit college industry. Both business models are adept at converting their customers’ government aid — food stamps for the bodega, subsidized student loans and GI Bill benefits for the colleges — into tidy private profits. But where the bodega is typically owned by recent immigrants living in the neighborhood, for-profit schools are hugely profitable enterprises owned by investment firms with a well-organized lobbying arm. (Korean grocers beware: Goldman Sachs probably has you in their sights next.) Read more on What’s Good For The For-Profit Colleges Is Good For America…